What We Can Learn From North Carolina’s “Moral Mondays”

But then a broad-based coalition emerges, grounded in deep leadership in the labor movement and communities of color. It uses the collective strength of these movements to mobilize and engage in sustained weekly actions of protest and civil disobedience. Eventually, these efforts defeat the executive’s ​“inevitable” agenda.

That’s not how things have played out in Trump’s second term — at least not yet. It’s a description of what organizers in North Carolina — led by Reverend William Barber and the North Carolina NAACP working with the state’s labor, environmental, and LGBTQ rights movements — were able to accomplish through what they called Moral Mondays, confronting problems quite similar to the ones increasingly besieged Americans are facing today.

“Malcolm X always reminded us that history has valuable lessons,” Angaza Laughinghouse told the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD). One of the initial organizers behind Moral Mondays and a retired president of UE Local 150, a public sector union in the state, she added, ​“It’s important for us to draw out those lessons that have advanced movements of the past and incorporate them into our analysis for today.” 

As the United States as a whole — and blue states in particular — are facing threats similar to what the Right unleashed on North Carolina in 2013, it’s worth recalling the history of a movement that discredited the actions of an aggressively pro-corporate government while preparing the ground for Democrats to regain the governor’s mansion in North Carolina. At its peak, the Moral Mondays action offered an extraordinary example of the power of citizens to resist policies that fundamentally threaten the public good.

The key strategy of Moral Mondays — escalating weekly actions at the statehouse in Raleigh — combined nonviolent civil disobedience with public testimony from residents most impacted by right-wing policies. The fact is that regimes only change behavior in response to sustained and persistent pressure. This is the lesson not only of Moral Mondays but of movements for social justice throughout human history. Had the 1963 March on Washington not been paired with consistent grassroots organizing and direct actions for a Second Reconstruction, the Civil Rights Act of 1965 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 wouldn’t have been passed.

Moral Mondays grew out of a similar push by Barber seven years earlier, in 2006, when he launched the ​“HKonJ” (Historic Thousands on Jones Street) mobilization at the state capitol,soon after he took over as leader of the North Carolina NAACP. In consultation with leaders of the state’s progressive movements, a 14-point People’s Agenda was drafted covering everything from labor rights and healthcare to immigrant rights and peace as a broad set of demands to inspire public participation: to show what the movement was fighting for, not just fighting against. In 2007, over 3,000 people joined his call to march on the state capitol in Raleigh.

Republicans won the gubernatorial race in 2012 amid a two-cycle Tea Party wave in the state. In a precursor to the chaos Trump’s centibillionaire benefactor Elon Musk unleashed last year with the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), newly elected Republican Governor Pat McCrory appointed Art Pope, an extremely wealthy heir to a discount store fortune and the state’s largest political donor, as his state budget director. A diehard conservative ideologue, Pope had spent $55 million of his family’s fortune seeking to advance a radical right-wing agenda of regressive tax cuts combined with extreme cuts to government operations and social safety net programs. The emergency his agenda created was the catalyst for Barber and other progressives in North Carolina to mobilize.

At the initial Moral Monday protest on April 29, 2013, authorities arrested 17 people in a nonviolent civil disobedience action. From there, the movement grew every week.

Protesters –– clergy, workers, students, teachers –– chose Mondays because that’s the day the legislature began its work. The weekly rhythm ensured that public attention didn’t dissipate but instead remained focused on what Moral Mondays was seeking to accomplish. By July, when protesters took a six-month hiatus at the end of the legislative session, the weekly crowds had grown to 2,500. And once they returned in February 2014, 80,000 people marched in Raleigh against the McCrory-Pope agenda.

“What caught people’s attention is that we all came back the next week,” Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, a preacher and writer who works closely with Barber, told CMD. ​“Throughout that summer the crowd of people who went into the statehouse and consistently came back with growing numbers is what made it a news story, which then gave the movement a chance to inform the public about what was happening.”

“They laughed at us at first,” Barber recalled in an interview with CMD. ​“By June, thousands of people were showing up. By July, the governor’s poll numbers showed he had gone from 60 to under 40 [% approval]. It was the consistency and moral clarity of that movement that shifted the atmosphere in North Carolina.”

The success of Moral Mondays in clarifying the issues for North Carolinians was simple, Barber points out. ​“You need to not just say who you are against but what you are for. The consistency of it meant that every week we took over the news. [Our message] was everywhere.”

Barber argued that an intersectional approach — emphasizing the interconnected nature of issues and constituencies — was also essential to the initial success of Moral Mondays. ​“Every Monday had a policy focus with the goal of bringing formerly siloed issues together,” he explained. ​“We were creating mass public education to counter the authoritarianism going on at that time.”

Nancy MacLean, a historian at Duke University and author of Democracy in Chains (also a CMD board member), adds, ​“Anyone who understood that their cause needed responsive democracy to achieve its goals became part of this movement.”

In order to pass a pro-corporate agenda, ​“state legislatures and Congress need to keep people in the dark,” Barber maintains.

With Moral Mondays, ​“we drew people from all across the state to come and participate,” Larsene Taylor, also a former president of UE Local 150, told CMD. ​“Education, the environment, voting rights, and health care — all the things that were important to people mobilized them to take action.”

The labor movement played a critical role in the success of the sustained effort. ​“The AFL-CIO and the state labor movement were really engaged in the initial efforts of Moral Mondays,” MaryBe McMillan, a former president of the North Carolina AFL-CIO, told CMD. She concluded that labor organizations in the state saw working with the broad coalition behind Moral Mondays as essential for their long-term survival. ​“In North Carolina where we have such a small labor movement, we realized that if we wanted to win anything for working people we need all the friends we can get,” McMillan said. ​“We had a long history of working in coalition with many of the partners in Moral Mondays. In states with a lot higher union density, the unions [often] think that they can go it alone.” (North Carolina usually ties with South Carolina for the lowest union density in the country.)

Taylor recalled the February 2014 rally as pivotal. ​“80,000 people. All you could see were people, of all kinds, colors, nationalities. A sea of people! It was supposed to rain. I’m facing east, and from the podium I could see when the sun came through the crowds. It was just awesome.”

While Moral Mondays lost some momentum after March 2014 — in part because the national NAACP, which could have helped the NC NAACP capitalize on the momentum, underwent a leadership transition — the die had already been cast. As Barber noted above, after four months of initial protest in 2013, McCrory’s approval ratings were deep underwater by summer — and he never recovered.

A federal appeals court struck down sweeping voting restrictions that had been pushed through by McCrory and Pope in time for the 2016 election, holding that the law was crafted to ​“target African Americans with almost surgical precision.” And after years of organizing by groups like the North Carolina Justice Center, the state finally expanded Medicaid in 2023 after it had been blocked by McCrory a decade earlier.

“We did build militant tactics that gave results,” Laughinghouse affirmed. ​“We expanded voting rights during this period with Moral Mondays. We got rid of Pat McCrory. We were able to see Democrats Roy Cooper and Josh Stein as our governors. What we learned is that when we build a strong powerful coalition of organizations with grassroots organizers, we can push back and resist this growing fascist movement.”

Until recently, ​“the question of whether or not we were facing fascism was an open debate,” Wilson-Hartgrove, the writer and preacher, told CMD. Now, however, it’s ​“fairly common to recognize that this regime is authoritarian. Most people say we have to vote in the midterms, but just waiting for the next election has rarely been enough to turn authoritarian takeovers around.”

While some political and party leaders fail to grasp that point, the people are clearly not waiting. Millions of Americans all across the country have taken part in thousands of protests against Trump’s authoritarian actions over the past year. More than five million people turned out for the October 2025 national ​“No Kings” mobilization, and organizers are shooting for nine million for the next one on March 28.

In Minneapolis, faith leaders, unions, students, and community groups have mounted daily protests in the face of Trump’s violent and retaliatory anti-immigrant ​“surge.” On Friday, January 23, one quarter of Minnesotans took part in a general strike and day of action against the Trump administration’s occupation of Minneapolis and murder of two of its citizens. People in cities across the country continue to hold rallies and strikes in solidarity with Minnesotans.

Clearly, the stakes have gotten even higher since the No Kings mass marches in June and October. What the Moral Mondays experience shows is the critical importance of consistent action to keep pressure on an increasingly authoritarian regime.

Barber also emphasizes the need to articulate a positive and inclusive agenda as part of the widespread opposition to Trump’s authoritarianism, connecting the assault on democracy to a set of policies that seeks to eliminate poverty. The danger for organizers, he believes, is ​“not taking seriously the issue of poverty and low wages. Five hundred people were dying from poverty every day before Covid. When we got to 500 people dying a day from Covid, it was an epidemic. That the issues of poverty and low wages are often not raised up and pushed by organizers is a major error.”

By contrast, he argues, ​“When we frame our movement as a moral movement, what it does is gives us our flexibility, our dexterity. We have to begin to understand that anybody who is concerned about the environment and is not at the same time fighting for voting rights is missing it.”

In North Carolina, Barber is now calling for a new mass march from Wilson, NC to Raleigh between February 11 and 14. The mobilization focuses on the racist impact of the legislature’s latest gerrymandered congressional map. ​“We’re calling for a massive moral people’s assembly — to launch a season of moralization,” he said. ​“At this particular gathering we’re not going to be partisan, we’re going to be principled. If you love voting rights, if you love fully funded public education, if you love healthcare for all people, it’s time to love forward together.”

“We need to learn the lessons from history — particularly Black history, which is central to fighting the fascism and the white supremacy that we faced in earlier periods of American history,” Laughinghouse concludes.